Nancy MacLean, “Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the
Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America,” Viking, 2017, 234 pp.
I’ve noticed over the past years that the alt-Right
people keep claiming there is a Deep-State conspiracy of some sort going
on. Turns out that they are correct and
they own it: Kind of like Pogo said years ago: “We have met the
enemy and he is us.” They even have
their own Nobel winning economist, James McGill Buchanan who recently died, but
no-matter: the Koch brothers (one who recently also died) who funded him have others in their stable. These are the same Koch brothers that
regarded Ronald Reagan as too liberal. They are for the Libertarian platform
formulated by their economist James Buchanan; that platform calls for
abolishing all federal income taxes and virtually every federal agency,
including the I.R.S., the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the F.E.C., the E.P.A., the
F.D.A., and the S.E.C. The Libertarian Party also opposed Medicaid, Medicare,
Social Security, public education, and minimum-wage and child-labor laws. This plan sounds fantastic? Well…Buchanan had the opportunity to
implement the mechanisms in his plan in Chile when Augusto Pinochet, with CIA
help, deposed Salvador Allende’s
socialist government (1973) and took power.
(Friedman had a hand in this implementation as well). In any event, the title of this book “Democracy In Chains” is a derivative of how
Pinochet’s Constitutional changes, inspired by Buchanan’s ideas, ‘bound
democracy with locks and bolts,’ whereas the US Constitution enshrined ‘checks
and balances’.
We know all of this because the author, MacLean, found
documentation of Buchanan’s plans — including correspondence, meeting minutes
and personal papers — in Buchanan's previously unexplored archives. MacClean came upon her
biographical subject “by sheer serendipity,” she writes, while researching how
the state of Virginia responded to the Brown
v. Board of Education decision. Seeing the name of an unfamiliar economist
eventually led her to rooms full of documents that made clear how “operatives”
had been trained “to staff the far-flung and purportedly separate, yet
intricately connected, institutions funded by the Koch brothers and their now
large network of fellow wealthy donors.” Buchanan’s papers revealed how, from a
series of faculty perches at several universities, he spent his life laying out
a game plan for a right-wing social movement.
One part of his plan involved Social Security. The
election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 was a watershed for conservatives,
yet it quickly became clear that Reagan too would succumb to political
pressure. By 1982, Reagan’s fight to end Social Security was faltering. Amid
that debate, the libertarian Cato Institute, funded by the brothers Charles and
David Koch made privatization of Social Security its top priority and turned
to Buchanan for a master plan. Buchanan told them that “those who seek to undermine the existing structure” must do two things:
Make people doubt the viability of Social Security, and divide the public by
suggesting high earners be taxed at higher rates — which might sound
progressive but would ultimately undo the universal foundation of the program
itself.
My Notes:
Pg. xvii: In
2010 journalist Jane Mayer alerted Americans to the fact that Charles and David
Koch had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a war against
Obama. She also documented how the Kochs
and other rich right-wing donors were providing vast quantities of ‘dark money’
(political spending that, by law, had become untraceable) to groups and
candidates whose mission, if successful,
would hobble unions, limit voting, deregulate corporations, shift taxes to the
less well-off, and even deny climate change. (By 2014, only 8 of 278 Republicans in
Congress was willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real. This
campaign denying science is effective: The number of Americans who believed
that ‘the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate’ dropped
from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.
P. 217). (The author of this book
was researching the Virginia response to the 1954 desegregation ruling when she
serendipitously came upon James McGill Buchanan’s trove of documents. She had
discovered the neo-liberal right, i.e., those intellectuals that identify with
the eighteenth and nineteenth-century pro-market liberalism of thinkers such as
Adam Smith—especially such avid promoters as Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Friedrich
A. Hayek, and the lesser-known, but all-important, James McGill Buchanan.)
Pg. xxiv: Barry
Goldwater ran for President in 1964. But
when he conveyed to voters his desire to end Social Security as we know it, to
disallow the Civil Rights Act under the combined rubric of property rights and
states’ rights, to create a flat tax system, and to undercut public education,
he lost every state in the union except his home state of Arizona and those of
the Deep South. (This is still the
program of the alt-Right).
Pg. xxviii: The Republican party that we used to know
does not exist anymore. That party
is now in the control of a group of true believers for whom compromise is a
dirty word. They say their cause is
liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from
the reach of government—and the takeover of what was long public institutions
(schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporate
privatization. In the recent 2016
election the donor network had so much money and power at its disposal as the
primary season began that every single Republican presidential front-runner would
not admit that climate change was a real problem or that guns weren’t
good. They all attacked public education
and teachers’ unions and advocated more charter schools. All called for radical changes in taxation
and government spending. Each one
claimed that Social Security and Medicare were in mortal crisis and that
individual retirement and health savings accounts, presumably to be invested
with Wall Street firms, were the best solution.
Then along came Trump who did not need the Koch donor network’s money to
run, who seemed to have little grasp of the goals of this movement and was able
to successfully mock the candidates they had already cowed as ‘puppets.’
Pg. xxx: This
book tells the story of the economist James Buchanan and his progeny from 1956
to the present. The author questions
whether we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical
ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? Or
is this a story of something quite different, something never before seen in
American history? Could it be a fifth-column* assault on American democratic
governance?
*Fifth-column is a phrase which originated in the Spanish
Civil War, when one of Franco’s sub generals stated that he was counting on
four columns of troops outside Madrid and another column of persons hiding
within the city who would join the invaders as soon as they entered the
capital. Since then, the term ‘fifth
column’ has been applied to stealth supporters of an enemy who assist by
engaging in propaganda and even sabotage to prepare the way for its
conquest.
Pg. xxxi: The alt-right movement that has taken over
the Republican Party is pushed by a relatively small number of radical-right
billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s
modern system of government. The
size of the force they have sponsored is enormous. The Koch network operates on the scale of a
national US political party and employs more than three times as many people as
the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015. This force occupying the Republican Party is
pushing toward ends that most Republican voters do not want, such as the
privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and education.
Pg. 14:
Virginia’s poll tax required voters to pay a tax to participate in the
political process, and it was one of the states that also made that tax
cumulative, so that if, say, two elections had not featured candidates who
interested you but the third one did, you would have to pay all three years’
taxes to vote. This effectively
discouraged the poor from voting.
Pg. 38f: F.A.
Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom
argued that fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends
of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of these tendencies. In his view, their distinguishing and shared
feature was reliance on the central state; their people’s break with individual
self-reliance was the germ that caused the disease. (Any
system that requires large government control will lead to totalitarian states;
people are deluding themselves in believing that socialism and freedom can be
combined, in Hayek’s view). [Note: I’m
not convinced Hayek is wrong about this.]
Hayek’s book spoke powerfully to right-wing American
businessmen still smarting from the loss of time-honored prerogatives of the
propertied class, who now were told that they had to negotiate with unions and
meet regulatory agency rules and standards.
To them, the reforms of the Depression and WWII constituted an
illegitimate revolution. The New Deal
was nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another
name. (Hayek and von Mises as well as
Buchanan maintained that the market could coordinate millions of individual projects
far better than the government could. He
maintained that the market was simply the most efficient means of allocating
goods and services but also the best social decision-maker. P. 41).
Pg. 66: After
the 1954 desegregation decision of the Supreme Court Professors Buchanan and
Nutter made the case for unlimited privatization of education to avoid
integration: tax-funded private schools, they proposed, was the answer. (Today we call them Charter Schools). This went nowhere at the time as most
legislators understood that a fire sale of tax-funded public schools to private
school operators would be political suicide.
They wanted to stop integration, not be ejected from office.
Pg. 75: In
1962, in Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court
ended the practice by which the states simply ignored census data showing
population growth in the more moderate urban and suburban areas in order to
give rural conservative districts more than their fair share of
representation. In 1964, the
Twenty-Fourth Amendment forever outlawed the use of poll taxes as a
precondition for voting in federal elections.
Two years later (1966) in Harper
v. Virginia Board of Elections it
ended the poll tax in state elections.
Pg. 81f: In
1958 Virginia created the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government
(VCCG) which aimed to attack the New Deal and ‘the misinterpretation’ of the
Constitution ‘during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.’ In short, the VCCG was taking aim at the
entire structure of constitutional understanding on which federal regulation,
organized labor’s power, and civil rights protections alike depended. The commission spread its message that the federal government had been acting illegitimately
since at least the 1930s—a school of thought that would later be associated
with Justice Clarence Thomas and others on the arch right. Core VCCG ideas became part of the approach
of the Virginia school of political economy.
Pg. 129: In
1967 after two heart attacks felled Charles Koch’s father, Fred, Charles, age
thirty-two, took over as head of the company.
He would turn Koch Industries into the second-largest privately held
company in America—with yearly revenues of more than $115 billion with some
sixty-seven thousand employees in almost sixty nations. (Fred Koch was a co-founder of the John Birch
society).
Pg. 135:
Charles Koch found the uncompromising James Buchanan much more to his
liking than Milton Friedman. In fact,
Koch referred to Friedman and the rest of the post-Hayek Chicago school of
economics he led, as well as to Alan Greenspan, as ‘sellouts to the system.’ Why?
Because they sought ‘to make government work more efficiently when the
true libertarian should be tearing it out at the roots.’ They actually tried to help government
deliver better results, which could only prolong the disease.
Pg. 162:
Buchanan’s ideas had a real-world trial in Chile after Allende was
assassinated (with CIA help) and General Pinochet took over. The resulting changes to the constitution
removed major social questions—such as macroeconomic policy—from democratic
influence. It seems that Buchanan should
have anticipated how General Pinochet—having done away with independent media,
freedom of speech, political parties, and so many regulations—could easily
purloin public monies to enrich himself. (In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on
the US, Congress began investigating foreign money-laundering and discovered
Pinochet had 125 separate accounts in seven countries.) Chile finally got rid of Pinochet in 1989 and
elected a president and a congress for the first time in nearly twenty years.
Pg. 177: Reagan’s tax cuts created a deficit that
was three times larger than the one he inherited from Jimmy Carter. At $2.7 trillion, it was the worst in US
history.
Pg. 184:
Buchanan maintained that the Constitution needed to be changed so that
public officials would be legally constrained from offering new social
programs. Again, at every opportunity he
had told his allies that no ‘mere changing of the political guard will
suffice,’ the ‘the problems of our times
require attention to the rules rather than the rulers.’ The project must aim toward the practical
‘removal of the sacrosanct status assigned to majority rule.’
Pg. 185: In
1986 James Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his
‘contributions to the theory of political decision-making and public
economics.’ He was noted at the leading
researcher in the field of what has come to be known as ‘public choice theory.’
Traditional economic theory dealt with producers and consumers in market
place settings but made no effort to explain the behavior of political
actors. Buchanan, on the other hand,
brought attention to political actors quests for gains through exchange (of
votes, benefits, or coalition partners rather than profits, per se) directed
new attention to ‘the rules of the game,’ i.e., the constitution in a broad
sense. These rules, far more than actors’ stated inclinations, ‘determined’ the
results of political processes, for different types of constitutions could
be predicted to produce different results.
What public choice revealed, in the end, was the fallacy of assuming
that market failure could be remedied through the political process, for there,
too, people behaved selfishly.
Pg. 191f: The Contract with America was not a public
choice document, per se, although the man most responsible for its creation, Dick
Armey, could not have been a more loyal convert to the cause. (Newt Gingrich claimed most of the
credit). In any event, every one of the
367 Republican candidates for the House and nearly all the incumbents got on
board for the signing in 1994, this was midway through President Bill Clinton’s
first term in office. On election night
Republicans swept both houses of Congress.
To get the Contract passed, Armey had urged that a school prayer amendment
be added to the contract to keep the Christian Coalition on board. He lost on that proposal as well as including
the balanced budget amendment. Worse,
loss turned to failed brinkmanship when the House Republicans voted for two
protracted government shutdowns in order to, in effect, force the government to
stop spending by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. In the end, as their representatives in
Washington should have known all along, voters were not ready when they learned
that free markets would leave them with sole responsibility for their own
fates, to give up their Social Security and Medicare, their public schools, and
their government-backed air, water, and earth protections.
Pg. 212:
Charles Koch has always argued that his vision of a good society will
bring prosperity to all. But the people
he relies upon to justify and advance his vision, apparently believe
otherwise. For instance, James Buchanan
in 2005 stated that people who failed to foresee and save money for their
future needs, ‘are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin
to…animals who are dependent.’
Buchanan’s successor, Tyler Cowen, ‘…worthy individuals will manage to
climb their way out of poverty, that will make it easier to ignore those who
are left behind.’ Cowen foresees that we
will cut Medicaid for the poor. People
who have had their government benefits cut or pared back should pack up and
move to lower-cost states like Texas.
Pg. 214: What happened in Flint Michigan was not a
natural disaster. What happened was
directly attributable to the prodding of the Mackinac Center, one of the first
Koch-funded—and in this case, Koch-staffed—state-level think and do tanks
that now exist in all fifty states and are affiliated with the State Policy
Network (SPN), also Koch-concocted to coordinate efforts to prevent state
governments from responding to the demands of the ‘takers.’ “When the Mackinac Center speaks, we listen,”
said Michigan governor John Engler in 1994.
Indeed, so did his successors. In
2011, the center pushed hard for legislation that would allow the governor to
take over all aspects of local government in any community facing a ‘financial
emergency.’ By 2009, more than half of
the deindustrializing troubled state’s black voters were being governed by
emergency appointed (not elected) managers, among them the residents of
Detroit, Benton Harbor, and Flint. These
managers have the authority to unilaterally abrogate collective bargaining
agreements, outsource services, sell off local resources to private companies,
and change suppliers at will. All while
being protected from lawsuits. To save
money, Flint’s appointed manager switched the source of the city water supply
to the polluted Flint River.
Pg. 220: The
new anti-union rules introduced in Wisconsin in 2011 are lethal in their
cumulative impact. Wisconsin public
employees are no longer allowed to negotiate working conditions and benefits,
only wages (with those held to the rate of inflation). Each contract would be only a year in
duration, thus draining staff time and energy away from addressing the concerns
of existing members. Unions would lose
the right to have dues deducted from member’s paychecks. Also, the 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 established an annual recertification requirement for
unions representing general employee bargaining units in the municipal and
state sectors to continue as the exclusive collective bargaining
representative. General employee units include all employee groups except
public safety and transit. To meet the annual recertification requirement,
continuation of the union’s status as the exclusive representative must be
favored in a secret ballot election conducted by the Commission by at least
fifty-one percent (51%) of the employees in the bargaining unit who are
eligible to vote.
Pg. 226: The US
has many obstacles to majority rule.
Four were put in place by the slavery-defending founders' Constitution:
absolute veto power for the Senate, for the House, and for the president (if
not outvoted by a two-thirds majority), and a Constitution that cannot be
altered without the agreement of two-thirds of the states after Congress. Other features further obstruct majority
rule, including a winner-take-all Electoral College that encourages a two-party
system; the Tenth Amendment, which steers power toward the states; and a system
of representation in the unusually potent Senate that violates the principle of
‘one person, one vote.’
Pg. 227:
Buchanan’s program calling for constitutional revolution would make it
even more difficult for the majority’s will to prevail unless the very
wealthiest Americans agree fully with every measure. The project has multiple prongs. One is a vast legal shift. In 2015, the New York Times headlined an
investigative report, ‘Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of
Justice.’ American corporations are
inserting in the extensive fine print of applications for employment, credit
cards, cell phone service, medical practices, or long-term care, language
compelling signers to mandatory arbitration.
They are privatizing our Justice System.
Pg. 229: Chief
Justice Roberts’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act case, National Federation of Independent Business
v. Sebelius, was mistakenly criticized by many on the Right. Smart
court watchers noted not the verdict but what Roberts said about the Commerce
Clause. Some context: in 1937, when the Supreme Court upheld a
minimum wage law for the first time and then the Wagner Act, too, signaling its
acceptance of the New Deal, it did so by agreeing with the government that the
Commerce Clause of Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the ability to
regulate interstate trade. Under the
rubric of regulating interstate trade the federal government then dramatically
increased its oversight of what used to be considered strictly private or state
matters. But Roberts now commented in
the ACA case that ‘the Commerce Clause is not a general license to regulate an
individual from cradle to grave’ (a proposition no one has suggested.). So now Roberts’
narrow conception of the Commerce Clause is the law of the land—and an
invitation to legal challenges to other federal legislation and programs.
Pg. 233: A
summary of James Buchanan’s and Charles Koch’s idea of liberty includes a
federal government subjected to the most thorough control by an oligarchy. This oligarchic model was present in Virginia
during Harry Byrd’s tenure, especially during the 50s. Of course Byrd’s state-mandated racial
oppression would not now be included, but nearly all else about midcentury
Virginia would: the uncontested sway of the wealthiest citizens; the use of
right-to-work laws and other ploys to keep working people powerless; the
ability to fire dissenting public employees at will, targeting educators in
particular; the use of voting-rights restrictions to keep those unlikely to
agree with the elite from the polls; the deployment of states’ rights to deter
the federal government from promoting equal treatment; the hostility to public
education; the regressive tax system; the opposition to Social Security, Medicare
and Medicaid; and the parsimonious response to public needs of all kinds—not
just decent schools but also the care and shelter of the elderly poor, and the
mentally ill.
Addenda:
Useful links:
No comments:
Post a Comment